Mobile Monday London: March 2010

28 Mar 2010

So who are you going to see on 29 March at Demo Night?

Well, it’s shaping up to be an interesting evening and it’ll be a busy one for sure judging by the registrations we’ve had. We have a variety of companies and individuals who will be showing you what they’re up to and we’re hoping for lots of discussion.

And we’re proudly sponsored by IPC Media, Orange Vallee and BlackBerry.

So who do we have? In no particular order:

James Hugman from Future Platforms will be presenting the Guardian Anywhere, a free product we've released for Android devices which helps you read your daily newspaper (and which we're looking to license to other news properties).

Chetan Damani from Imano will be demonstrating the acrossair augmented reality browser to explain how it works and how potential partners can integrate with their platform.

Finbar Hawkins, HipLogic evangelist, will be showing everyone HipLogic Live, available now on Nokia and Windows Mobile and available soon for Android, which gives you a one-touch access point to your social networks, news stories and applications that is always on.

Marko Balabanovic is presenting from lastminute.com labs. What’s good around here? Mobile apps that recommend things to do in cities from lastminute.com labs, with some brand new launches.

Matt Pollitt will be joining us from ustwo to show us PositionApp - With over 200,000 downloads, nearly 1 million user sessions, PositionApp is the number one mobile app discovery and metrics tool in the iTunes store.

Katie Lips is coming from Little World Gifts and will show us their virtual gifts platform on next generation mobile devices.

Georgina Mackenzie from Toytek will be presenting their app, The Ultimate Alphabet, a puzzle-based word game using clues and anagrams to explore 26 realistic and surreal paintings; from basic to complex and even specialist words hidden within these images.

Giles Corbett from Orange Vallee will be showing us ON which makes phonebooks smarter by bringing together all users’ contacts and by helping manage user notifications across a range of different contact groups http://www.lifeisbetteron.com/

Sander Munsterman is from XS2TheWorld which is an award winning innovative mobile marketing company creating tailor made solutions for consumers and brands. They’re going to showcase their fuel checker application built for BP.

Martin Macmillan will be presenting from Bounce Mobile. They provide applications that give consumers new ways to interact with digital music via their mobile. The app they’ll be showing us is Fireplayer which is an app that allows you to remix and share your favourite music on your mobile.

Terence Eden will be showing off one of his latest projects http://ivote2010.co.uk/

Plus

Ed Moore from Ocasta Labs sharing what they’re doing with Agora which is a mobile optimised social marketplace that matches buyers & sellers of goods & services by interest, location & reputation.

Ed Hodges will be here to show Touchnote Postcards which allows you to send physical postcards from your phone to anyone, anywhere in the world.

John Roberts from Qustodian talking about mobile marketing

And maybe a few surprises too… watch this space!

22 Mar 2010

So who are you going to see on 29 March at Demo Night?

And we’re proudly sponsored by IPC Media, Orange Vallee and BlackBerry.

So who do we have? In no particular order:

Chetan Damani from Imano will be demonstrating the acrossair augmented reality browser to explain how it works and how potential partners can integrate with their platform.

Marko Balabanovic is presenting from lastminute.com labs. What’s good around here? Mobile apps that recommend things to do in cities from lastminute.com labs, with some brand new launches.

Katie Lips is coming from Little World Gifts and will show us their virtual gifts platform on next generation mobile devices.

Terence Eden will be showing off one of his latest projects http://ivote2010.co.uk/

Plus

Ed Moore from Ocasta Labs sharing what they’re doing with Agora which is a mobile optimised social marketplace that matches buyers & sellers of goods & services by interest, location & reputation.

John Roberts from Qustodian talking about mobile marketing

And maybe a few surprises too… watch this space!

12 Mar 2010

29th March is Demo night!

Exciting news! We're very pleased to announce that our next event is on Monday 29th March and will be kindly hosted by IPC Media at the Blue Fin Building on Southwark Street. And just like the last time we were there back in June, we're going to do a demo night. So we're after interesting mobile applications, services and products to present to our community. We have room for about 10 or so companies to demo their wares during the evening. The format is show 'n tell style of about 5 minutes (we'll be strict with the time) with a chance for questions, comments and constructive feedback from the audience. Want to know how it worked last time? Then take a look at our blog archive from last June - http://mobilemonday.org.uk/archive/2009_06_01_archive.html

So are you up for presenting on the 29th March? Is there something out there that you think deserves to see the light of day. Then we'd love to hear from you. If you'd like to be considered, please email helen@[removethis]mobilemonday.org.uk or alex@[removethis]mobilemonday.org.uk as we're coordinating this one. We also need to know how you need to demo whatever it is you'd like to demo (slides, visualiser, audio, wifi etc).

If anyone out there can also bring kit to help us for the evening - that would be fantastic. We need visualisers, femtocell kits, remote clickers - you get the idea. If anyone can help out with this kind of stuff, we'll be eternally grateful. Help boosting the mobile signal would be particularly helpful. We're on the top floor of a tall building and mobile reception can peter out the further up the building you go (although we will have wifi).

And on that note, we're still after a co-sponsor for the evening so we can have more beer and can cover the cost of hiring in any equipment that we need. If you're interested in supporting this one, please get in touch with Helen or Alex as above.

Technorati Tags: demo night,mobile applications,mobile web,mobile internet,mobile services,show 'n tell

4 Mar 2010

Where mobile meets media…

It’s a big topic. We’re led to believe that the mainstream media world is in trouble with declining advertising revenues and difficulty in matching available revenues with cost of production. And not only that, there’s a whole new world of mobile and social media out there with unclear revenue models. Where do you place your bets? Do you knock down your existing business to create the new one? Do you wait before making your move but risk missing the boat altogether. These are all questions the answers to which are still unclear.

And this topic was also on our minds in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress where the UKTI hosted a Mobile Monday London panel session discussing this very thing. Paul Skeldon from Telemedia 360 took some video of it, the highlights of which you can see below. It's in four parts with Russell Buckley, VP of Global Alliances at Admob chairing (and co-founder of Mobile Monday Germany and co-star at the Mobhappy blog), and Chris Boden from Lonely Planet in Australia, Lucie McLean from the BBC, Steve Ives, CEO at Taptu and yours truly on the panel.

Is Traditional Media Dead?

Is Advertising Dead?

Are Applications Dead?

Will the iPad Save Us?

Paul also covered the panel session in this month’s Telemedia 360’s PDF newsletter which is worth a read if media and mobile is your game. [You can download a free copy from their website.] I am widely quoted in the article but to get the full context, it’s probably best to view the videos *and* read the article too to get the whole picture.

You might also be interested to know that the FT Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference was on this week. Although not there, some of the tweets from it are worth a look. Have a look for the hashtag #FTMedia10 and follow FTDigitalMedia on Twitter. I’m sure there’ll be some news and blog coverage coming out of this conference too, so watch this space.

Another *must read* article is this one Understanding the participatory news consumer – a comprehensive breakdown of the latest Pew Internet research showing what the US digital news consumer is up to on their mobile phone. I’m not going to repeat what the article covers, but it shows that mobile internet users access the internet more often than their fixed line counterparts:

“On-the-go news consumers: Who are they?

The typical on-the-go news consumer is a white male, age 34, who has graduated from college and is employed full-time. Given their younger profile, it is not surprising that 40% of this group are parents of young children (compared with 30% of the general adult population), and 32% have never been married. One in three (32%) live in households with incomes of $75,000 or more. As a subset of the broader mobile internet population, on-the-go news consumers reflect many of their characteristics (see table below).

Not surprisingly, on-the-go news consumers maximize their cell phone use. They are 67% more likely than other cell phone users to text message, more than twice as likely to take pictures with their phones, and four times as likely to use their phones to instant message. They are also especially heavy internet users—80% of this on-the-go group are online on a given day, compared with just 67% of other internet users—and they engage in activities such as blogging (20% v. 11%), using social networking sites (73% v. 48%), and using status update sites like Twitter (29% v. 14%) at significantly higher rates than other internet users.”

Technorati Tags: mobile,mobile media,barcelona,mwc10,mobile world congress,Russell Buckley,BBC,Lonely Planet,Taptu